A Redder Summer

On the third Saturday of
July in 1919, a number of military men—some recently discharged,
some just off-duty, but many in uniform—began indiscriminately
beating black men who happened to be walking in the area of the
National Mall in Washington D.C. The attackers sought to avenge a
white woman who had been
allegedly “jostled” by two black men; she claimed that they
tried to steal her umbrella. The Washington Post reported
the incident under the headline “Negroes Attack Girl.”

Washington, D.C., faced a particular set of racial tensions that
summer. Local newspapers carried reports decrying the racial
conflict tearing apart the nation in other cities, all the while
publishing sensational stories about a new wave of crime caused by
blacks in D.C. The Washington Post published a letter to
the editor on July 13th that was concerned about the “crimes and
outrages that have recently been committed.” It suggested that,
because “many of the suspects are negros” perhaps some “negro
ex-soldiers” should be appointed to the police force.

The city certainly had no shortage of ex-soldiers, many of whom
had stayed after the end of World War I, but the vast majority of
them were white. After the story of the jostled woman broke, a
false rumor spread that she was the wife of a retired Navy
employee. The soldiers, unoccupied by work in a city with too many
bodies and too few jobs, saw this as grounds for a counterattack.
The next evening, they planned to assault a man named John Colle,
who was believed to be one of the two jostlers. On their way, the
soldiers attacked black men at random. The violence continued on
Sunday as bands of whites pulled black men off of passing
streetcars and began beating them. In one statement to the NAACP,
recovered by historian Delia Mellis in her dissertation about the
D.C. riots of 1919, “The Monsters We Defy,” a man reported riding
the Seventh Street streetcar, “when a mob of sailors and soldiers
jumped on the car and pulled me off beatting [sic] me unmercifully
from head to foot leaving me in such a condition that I could
hardly crawl back home.” He was seventeen years old.

Black men and women in D.C. began fighting back. They formed
armed patrols of their own neighborhoods and, in some cases, shot
at whites that they felt posed a threat. In one incident, at
Seventh and T, black rioters who refused to disperse when ordered
by police began firing, while women hanging out of windows threw
whatever they could at the police from above. As the violence
spilled over into Monday, the city brought in over a thousand
federal soldiers in an attempt to restore order. But the military
didn’t end the rioting: Torrents of rain swept through the city and
helped wash away the chaos. “It may be,” the then-field secretary
of the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson, later wrote, “that the rain had
something to do with the things that did not happen.” By riot’s
end, the mostly white police force in D.C. had arrested far more
black men than whites. Often, armed black men defending their
neighborhoods were arrested and jailed on weapons charges. When
Johnson met with the chief of police and the commissioner after the
riots had subsided to request that black “special officers” be
appointed to protect blacks from unprovoked attacks by whites, both
categorically refused.

After the riots, in the NAACP’s monthly periodical,
Crisis, Johnson praised black efforts to fight back. “The
Negroes saved themselves and saved Washington,” he wrote, “by their
determination not to run, but to fight—fight in defense of their
lives and their homes.” Had they not fought, claimed Johnson,
“Washington would have been another and worse East St. Louis.”
(During that riot-turned-massacre in 1917, at least thirty-nine
black men, women, and children died after whole blocks were burned
to the ground under the eye of police officers whose mandate it was
to protect them.) In the end, Johnson felt that the riots marked “a
turning point in the psychology of the whole nation regarding the
Negro problem.” He was wrong.

Only days after the wet halted the D.C. riot, the drowning of a
seventeen-year-old black teenager at a segregated swimming area in
Chicago, and the subsequent arrest of a black man for the
crime—whites onshore had pelted him with rocks—set off one of even
greater magnitude. It lasted for five days, resulting in
twenty-eight deaths and over five hundred injuries. Riots followed
in Syracuse, in Philadelphia, and in five other states over the
next month. The season of riots ended with one in Elaine, Arkansas,
at the beginning of October, in which over a hundred blacks were
killed.

Johnson later called that summer the Red Summer, because of the
blood that spilled in so many cities—the blood to which Jean
Toomer, in the story cycle Cane, directs the question:
“Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh
Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores,
restaurants, and cabarets? Eddying on the corners?” In Washington
D.C., it was in large part uniformed men, most of whom had just
returned from war, and, still in their combat uniforms, had brought
it back with them.

“It Was a
Riot” is a new, occasional series about riots in American
history.